Implementation and Benchmarking of a Crypto Processor for a NB-IoT SoC Platform

The goal of this Master’s Thesis is to investigate the implementation of cryptographic algorithms for IoT and how these encryption systems can be integrated in a NarrowBand IoT platform. Following 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specifications, the Evolved Packet System (EPS) Encryption Algorithms (EEA) and EPS Integrity Algorithms (EIA) have been implemented and tested. The latter are based on three different ciphering algorithms, used as keystream generators: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), SNOW 3G and ZUC. These algorithms are used in Long Term Evolution (LTE) terminals to perform user data confidentiality and integrity protection. In the first place, a thorough study of the algorithms has been conducted. Then, we have used Matlab to generate a reference model of the algorithms and the High-Level Synthesis (HLS) design flow to generate the Register-Transfer Level (RTL) description from algorithmic descriptions in C++. The keystream generation and integrity blocks have been tested at RTL level. The confidentiality block has been described along with the control, datapath and interface block at a RTL level using System C language. The hardware blocks have been integrated into a processor capable of performing hardware confidentiality and integrity protection: the crypto processor. This Intellectual Property (IP) has been integrated and tested in a cycle accurate virtual platform. The outcome of this Master’s Thesis is a crypto processor capable of performing the proposed confidentiality and integrity algorithms under request.The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the big revolutions that our society is expected to go through in the near future. This represents the inter-connection of devices, sensors, controllers, and any items, refereed as things, through a network that enables machine-to-machine communication. The number of connected devices will greatly increase. The applications taking advantage of IoT will enable to develop a great amount of technologies such as smart homes, smart cities and intelligent transportation. The possibilities allowed are huge and not yet fully explored. Picture yourself in the near future having a nice dinner with some friends. Then, you suddenly recall that your parking ticket expires in five minutes and unfortunately your car is parked some blocks away. You are having a good time and feel lazy to walk all the way to where you parked your car to pay for a time extension. Luckily enough, the parking meter is part of the IoT network and allows you, with the recently installed new application in your smart-phone, to pay this bill from anywhere you are. This payment will be sent to the parking meter and your time will be extended. Problem solved, right? Well, the risk comes when you perform your payment, not knowing that your "worst enemy" has interceded this communication and is able to alter your transaction. Perhaps, this individual decides to cancel your payment and you will have to pay a fine. Or even worse, this person steals your banking details and uses your money to take the vacations you’ve always wanted. There are many examples in our everyday life where we expose our personal information. With an increasing number of devices existing and using wireless communications without the action of an human, the security is a key aspect of IoT. This Master’s Thesis addresses the need to cover these security breaches in a world where an increasing amount of devices are communicating with each other. With the expansion of IoT where billions of devices will be connected wirelessly, our data will be widely spread over the air. The user will not be able to protect their sensible data without these securing capabilities. Therefore, different security algorithms used in today’s and tomorrow’s wireless technologies have been implemented on a chip to secure the communication. The confidentiality and integrity algorithms aim to solve the two aspects of the problem: protect the secrecy of banking details and prevent the alteration of the communication’s information. In this Master’s Thesis we have developed a hardware processor for securing data during a wireless communication, specifically designed for IoT applications. The developed system is realized with minimal area and power in mind, so that they can be fitted even in the smallest devices. We have compared many different hardware architectures, and after exploring many possible implementations, we have implemented the security algorithms on a hardware platform. We believe the content of this Thesis work is of great interest to anybody interested in hardware security applied to the IoT field. Furthermore, due to the processes and methodology used in this work, it will also be of interest to people who want to know more about how higher level programming languages can be used to describe such a specialized circuit, like one performing security algorithms. Finally, people interested in hardware and software co-simulation will find in this project a good example of the utilization of such system modeling technique

Exoplanet imaging data challenge: benchmarking the various image processing methods for exoplanet detection

The Exoplanet Imaging Data Challenge is a community-wide effort meant to offer a platform for a fair and common comparison of image processing methods designed for exoplanet direct detection. For this purpose, it gathers on a dedicated repository (Zenodo), data from several high-contrast ground-based instruments worldwide in which we injected synthetic planetary signals. The data challenge is hosted on the CodaLab competition platform, where participants can upload their results. The specifications of the data challenge are published on our website https://exoplanet-imaging-challenge.github.io/. The first phase, launched on the 1st of September 2019 and closed on the 1st of October 2020, consisted in detecting point sources in two types of common data-set in the field of high-contrast imaging: data taken in pupil-tracking mode at one wavelength (subchallenge 1, also referred to as ADI) and multispectral data taken in pupil-tracking mode (subchallenge 2, also referred to as ADI+mSDI). In this paper, we describe the approach, organisational lessons-learnt and current limitations of the data challenge, as well as preliminary results of the participants’ submissions for this first phase. In the future, we plan to provide permanent access to the standard library of data sets and metrics, in order to guide the validation and support the publications of innovative image processing algorithms dedicated to high-contrast imaging of planetary systems

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Design of an area efficient crypto processor for 3GPP-LTE NB-IoT devices

Providing information security is crucial for the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, platforms in which the available power budget is very limited. This paper tackles this challenge and presents a cryptographic processor compliant with the security algorithms specified by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) standard. The proposed processor has been optimized to the needs of the low end portfolio technologies that compose the IoT market, which addresses low-area, low-cost and low-data rate applications. Operation analysis at the algorithm-level and hardware sharing at the architecture-level have enabled extensive area reduction. The cryptographic processor has been described using the High-Level Synthesis (HLS) design flow and integrated with a general purpose processor in a cycle accurate virtual platform. The design achieves a reduction of area ranging from 5% to 42% in comparison to similar work. Synthesis results using a 65-nm CMOS technology show that the processor has a hardware cost of 53.6 kGE, and is capable of performing at 52.4 Mbps for the block cipher and 800 Mbps for the stream cipher algorithms at a 100 MHz clock

A Dipteran's Novel Sucker Punch: Evolution of Arthropod Atypical Venom with a Neurotoxic Component in Robber Flies (Asilidae, Diptera)

Predatory robber flies (Diptera, Asilidae) have been suspected to be venomous due to their ability to overpower well-defended prey. However, details of their venom composition and toxin arsenal remained unknown. Here, we provide a detailed characterization of the venom system of robber flies through the application of comparative transcriptomics, proteomics and functional morphology. Our results reveal asilid venoms to be dominated by peptides and non-enzymatic proteins, and that the majority of components in the crude venom is represented by just ten toxin families, which we have named Asilidin1-10. Contrary to what might be expected for a liquid-feeding predator, the venoms of robber flies appear to be rich in novel peptides, rather than enzymes with a putative pre-digestive role. The novelty of these peptides suggests that the robber fly venom system evolved independently from hematophagous dipterans and other pancrustaceans. Indeed, six Asilidins match no other venom proteins, while three represent known examples of peptide scaffolds convergently recruited to a toxic function. Of these, members of Asilidin1 closely resemble cysteine inhibitor knot peptides (ICK), of which neurotoxic variants occur in cone snails, assassin bugs, scorpions and spiders. Synthesis of one of these putative ICKs, U-Asilidin₁-Mar1a, followed by toxicity assays against an ecologically relevant prey model revealed that one of these likely plays a role as a neurotoxin involved in the immobilization of prey. Our results are fundamental to address these insights further and to understand processes that drive venom evolution in dipterans as well as other arthropods

Exoplanet imaging data challenge: benchmarking the various image processing methods for exoplanet detection

The Exoplanet Imaging Data Challenge is a community-wide effort meant to offer a platform for a fair and common comparison of image processing methods designed for exoplanet direct detection. For this purpose, it gathers on a dedicated repository (Zenodo), data from several high-contrast ground-based instruments worldwide in which we injected synthetic planetary signals. The data challenge is hosted on the CodaLab competition platform, where participants can upload their results. The specifications of the data challenge are published on our website https://exoplanet-imaging-challenge.github.io/. The first phase, launched on the 1st of September 2019 and closed on the 1st of October 2020, consisted in detecting point sources in two types of common data-set in the field of high-contrast imaging: data taken in pupil-tracking mode at one wavelength (subchallenge 1, also referred to as ADI) and multispectral data taken in pupil-tracking mode (subchallenge 2, also referred to as ADI+mSDI). In this paper, we describe the approach, organisational lessons-learnt and current limitations of the data challenge, as well as preliminary results of the participants' submissions for this first phase. In the future, we plan to provide permanent access to the standard library of data sets and metrics, in order to guide the validation and support the publications of innovative image processing algorithms dedicated to high-contrast imaging of planetary systems. © 2020 SPIE.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Morphology and genomic hallmarks of breast tumours developed by ATM deleterious variant carriers

Abstract Background The ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM) gene is a moderate-risk breast cancer susceptibility gene; germline loss-of-function variants are found in up to 3% of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer (HBOC) families who undergo genetic testing. So far, no clear histopathological and molecular features of breast tumours occurring in ATM deleterious variant carriers have been described, but identification of an ATM-associated tumour signature may help in patient management. Methods To characterise hallmarks of ATM-associated tumours, we performed systematic pathology review of tumours from 21 participants from ataxia-telangiectasia families and 18 participants from HBOC families, as well as copy number profiling on a subset of 23 tumours. Morphology of ATM-associated tumours was compared with that of 599 patients with no BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations from a hospital-based series, as well as with data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Absolute copy number and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) profiles were obtained from the OncoScan SNP array. In addition, we performed whole-genome sequencing on four tumours from ATM loss-of-function variant carriers with available frozen material. Results We found that ATM-associated tumours belong mostly to the luminal B subtype, are tetraploid and show LOH at the ATM locus at 11q22–23. Unlike tumours in which BRCA1 or BRCA2 is inactivated, tumours arising in ATM deleterious variant carriers are not associated with increased large-scale genomic instability as measured by the large-scale state transitions signature. Losses at 13q14.11-q14.3, 17p13.2-p12, 21p11.2-p11.1 and 22q11.23 were observed. Somatic alterations at these loci may therefore represent biomarkers for ATM testing and harbour driver mutations in potentially ‘druggable’ genes that would allow patients to be directed towards tailored therapeutic strategies. Conclusions Although ATM is involved in the DNA damage response, ATM-associated tumours are distinct from BRCA1-associated tumours in terms of morphological characteristics and genomic alterations, and they are also distinguishable from sporadic breast tumours, thus opening up the possibility to identify ATM variant carriers outside the ataxia-telangiectasia disorder and direct them towards effective cancer risk management and therapeutic strategies

Additional file 1: of Morphology and genomic hallmarks of breast tumours developed by ATM deleterious variant carriers

Table S1. Genomic regions showing copy number loss or loss/LOH in at least 70% of ATM-associated tumours. (XLSX 70 kb

Additional file 3: of Morphology and genomic hallmarks of breast tumours developed by ATM deleterious variant carriers

Table S2. Comparison of genes altered at the copy number level between ATM-associated tumours and tumours from TCGA. (XLSX 13 kb